So how can you trust a security product made in China?IronKey uses the preferred AES encryption modeMost competitors use ECB (Electronic Code Book) mode, which is not recommended by NIST or NSA. However, two key weak links are encryption keys and the method employed for the encryption algorithm-Weak Key Protection in SoftwareMost competitors create their encryption keys outside of the deviceMost competitors store their encryption keys in NAND Flash memoryMade in ChinaSome competitors manufacture the drives and create encryption keys in factories overseas, which means when you leave the encryption keys floating around or escrowed by a foreign entity, you risk compromising the whole production run. In software there’s no way to prevent you from replaying and testing millions of passwords, and there’s products out there today that can guess 250,000 passwords a secondBoth hardware- and software-based encryption use strong encryption algorithms.

After 10 tries we lock you out, blow away the encryption keys, and blow away the data. This “always on” encryption is critical for data protection and for compliance in some industries (i.e., where, by regulation, you can’t let the user make a mistake)All Encryption keys are stored hardware and are not subject to “cold boot” attacks-an approach recently proven at Princeton where you take a computer that has software encryption, which is asleep or recently shut down, and spray a compressed-air cleaning spray (available at any office supply store) on the memory chips to cool them down to near freezing, and then extract the decryption keys, which allows you to reboot and get at the entire contents of the diskUnlike competitors, encryption keys are not created or escrowed outside the deviceProtects against password brute-force guessing - IronKey is more secure because all password verification is done in hardware. The key is the custom-designed IronKey CryptochipWe design devlop the Cryptochip ourselvesHardware-based encryption has the encryption algorithm in hardware (the Cryptochip in our case), an approach that is much more secure and runs much faster than software-based encryption, and puts no overhead on the drive itselfAll data is encrypted all the time-There’s no way to accidentally turn it off you can’t fail to have the driver installed there’s no way for a user to accidentally transfer a file to the wrong partition and have it not be encrypted etc.

Ironkey hacked